Tech

Oracle gets clearance by Justice Dept. for Sun acquisition

DanGallagher

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Oracle Corp. said Thursday afternoon that the U.S. Department of Justice has cleared its proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

Federal regulators were looking closely at the $5.6 billion deal, which was announced in April. The Justice Department issued a second request in late June for information on the proposed. Oracle
ORCL, -0.26%
said that regulators were most interested in licensing deals for Sun's Java software, which are utilized heavily by Oracle's competitors.

The deal still must be cleared by European regulators. The European Commission has set a deadline of Sept. 3 to issues its decision on the matter.

Issues the European Commission may be interested in include Oracle's potential acquisition of Sun's MySQL open source database software.

On Monday, Bjorn Schotte, an executive at German software developer Mayflower GmbH, wrote in an online posting that he'd received a letter from the commission inquiring about contact information for companies "that work with MySQL and open source products" who might be able to assist in its investigation.

European Commission staff had also asked Schotte in a questionnaire about the quality of InnoDB database software since its developer, Finland-based Innobase OY, was acquired by Oracle nearly four years ago, he wrote.

Sun acquired MySQL AB, the developer of MySQL, for $1 billion in early 2008.

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